October 20, 2010

Jagroop Singh
Professor Alvarez
English 110
18, October 2010

In the short film “A Girl like Me”, young black girls were interviewed and asked about there view of what people perceive as beauty. The girls believe that beauty basically had a specific set of traits and elements that include being white or having clean, nice, and natural hair. They also mentioned that as young kids to maturing adults they become aware of this Doxa. This leads the girls in the video to believe that the effects of this common belief is that, girls who don’t fit in to the doxa, mainly black girls, are deprived of their heritage, culture, values or “roots”. Then twenty-one children are asked to choose between two dolls, a black doll and a white doll. And surprisingly only six kids choose the black doll and fifteen choose the white doll. When they were asked why they did so, they replied that the white doll was good and the black doll was bad. Ironically when a little black girl was asked to choose the doll she liked and the one that was good she chose the white doll. But when told to pick out the doll that looked like her, she hesitated and reluctantly pushed up the black doll.
According to Bourdieu in Practical Reason “the dominated perceive the dominant through the categories that the relation of domination has produced and which are thus identical to the interests of the dominant”. (121-122).
The short film “A Girl like Me” illustrates a common belief which states that beauty is defined by a set of requirements such as being white (for the majority). And this is the dominant belief which produces two symbolic groups; the dominated group and the dominant group. And that this is the dominant perception of the infamous Doxa that is held in the symbolic market. This can be clearly seen when the little girl chooses and liked the white doll over the black doll, but ends up realizing that the black doll resembles her more then the white doll. Even though she was of an age where she could have easily ignored this natural reaction, it shows that still at her young age she was able to differentiate the dominant belief. Though in most cases this is very negligible, one can still notice that at a very young age people realize and become aware of the standard. And because of that they can be influenced by the dominant belief and the doxa starts to mold and mend the lives of these people. Ultimately they become the dominated group of the dominant belief.